Mar 1 Cafe – Searching for dark matter

with Matt Pyle

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

1403 Solano Ave, Albany, CA

7:00 pm

What is dark matter? For decades, firm astronomical evidence from observations of stars and galaxies has indicated that most of the matter in the universe cannot be seen directly in telescopes. Instead, this matter must be observed indirectly through its gravitational pull on the objects that we can see. This is how the term “dark matter” was coined…But how do we search for something we can’t see? Explore these questions with UC Berkeley astrophysicist Matt Pyle.

Searching for dark matter

Dr. Matt Pyle

Matt Pyle is the Michael M. Garland Chair Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley. He received his B.S. in Physics (2001) and B.E. in Aerospace Engineering (2002) from the University of Notre Dame, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University (2012). Subsequently, he crossed the bay and was a post-doctoral researcher at Berkeley. He joined the Berkeley Physics faculty as the Garland Assistant Professor in 2015.

Many of the questions he would like to ask about the nature of the universe today, for example “could dark matter be composed of particles with mass less than that of a proton?”, are simply impossible to answer with present technology. His goal is to develop these new detector technologies and then employ them to find answers to these questions. Currently, his group is focused on optimizing the design of massive low temperature calorimeters for the SuperCDMS low mass experiment as well as for other nuclear physics applications (primarily neutrinoless double beta decay).